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Andrew Fletcher, , and London in the eighteenth century

Citation for published version: Murdoch, A 2013 'Andrew Fletcher, Scotland, and London in the eighteenth century' School of History, Classics and Archaeology Website, pp. 1-20.

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Download date: 24. Sep. 2021 Andrew Fletcher, Scotland, and London in the eighteenth century Alexander Murdoch

Andrew Fletcher, later of Saltoun, was the grand nephew of the famous Scottish patriot and opponent of parliamentary union,i and son to another Andrew Fletcher, known at the time by his judicial title of Lord Milton.ii Milton was the son of Fletcher the patriot’s brother Henry, and for over forty years he combined high judicial office in Edinburgh with significant political influence. He became identified with the second and third dukes of , who his uncle had denounced as overmightly and selfish court politicians at the time the Treaty of Union was under debate in the last Scottish Parliament. He sent his eldest son to University and then Oxford, which could be read as evidence of the intention to encourage his son to enter politics. This certainly became the case after the Jacobite rebellion of 1745 shook the basis of the Whig regime in Scotland to its foundations. Andrew Fletcher’s father played an important role in preserving some sort of civil authority in Scotland as the Jacobite army came and went in the summer of 1745. His eldest son became one of his aides and was rewarded with a minor office in the Scottish Exchequer in 1746. By 1747 his father had obtained the support of the third duke of Argyll to put Fletcher forward as a parliamentary candidate for the Haddington district of (the burghs of Haddington, and , with Lauder in and in ). Following his election Fletcher became parliamentary secretary to the third duke of Argyll, an unofficial position he would occupy until Argyll’s death in 1761. Elected as Member of Parliament for the county of East Lothian in 1761, Fletcher would stand down as an M.P. in 1768 following his father’s death in 1766 after a relatively short but reputedly acute bout of senile dementia.iii He spent twenty years as a Scot at Westminster, returning to Scotland every summer from 1748 to 1765. After his father’s decline he all but ceased attendance at Parliament. This essay is written in two parts, the first of which discusses Fletcher’s involvement with politics in London, particularly the role he took up from 1759 to 1762 in relation to efforts by Scots M.P.s to extend legislation for a militia to Scotland on the grounds that to fail to do so broke the terms of the Treaty of Union. This became the defining issue in Fletcher’s political career and its association with the

1 idea of ‘completing the Union’, as Alexander Carlyle put it in 1759.iv This was what brought Fletcher to London and it is a perspective that characterises much of his correspondence from London to his father in Edinburgh. The second part of the essay explores other aspects of Fletcher’s letters from London, in which he writes at some length about his family’s estate in East Lothian, whereas his observation of London life are much more limited, demonstrating that in his case residence in London was never seen as something that would become permanent. It was very much part of the context of his political career as Member of Parliament for the Haddington district of burghs from 1747 to 1761, and M.P. for East Lothian from 1761 until he ceased attending Parliament in 1765.

I Fletcher was drawn into the world of Scots politics in London as part of a complicated political deal in 1748 aimed at keeping all elements of the Whig interest in Scotland content to work with the ‘Old Corps’ Whig ministry led by Henry Pelham, dominated by former associates of Sir Robert Walpole.v It should be noted, however, that while the distribution of places was redolent of ‘management’, the point was to keep the Whig interest in Scotland loyal enough to government to ensure that nothing like the Jacobite rebellion of 1745 would ever happen again. The third duke of Argyll had not been active in government in 1745 and refused to act against the rebellion when it broke out on the grounds that this was the responsibility of the current Secretary of State for Scotland, the Marquis of Tweeddale and the serving Lord Advocate, Robert Craigie, with whom Argyll refused to conduct political business.vi After their resignations this changed, and from 1746 to 1748 Argyll was engaged with negotiations with the government over the future structure of Scottish administration. As a result, Fletcher’s predecessor as secretary to the third duke of Argyll, John Maule, became a judge in the Scottish Court of Exchequer in 1748 and left Parliament. This opened the way for Fletcher to arrive in London at the age of 26, excited and evidently somewhat overawed at the prospect that lay before him. He did not possess the flair and confidence of his predecessor John Maule, scion of a famous Jacobite family from Angus, but for over a dozen years he was at the centre of what might be called Scottish politics in London. Yet ironically, the most vivid parts of his

2 correspondence concerning place all relate to Scotland. Perhaps this was not surprising, as his very presence in London, living at the Duke of Argyll’s townhouse at ‘the Library’ on Argyll Street near King’s Cross, was part of representing Scotland (or part of it) in London.vii Fletcher never considered the possibility of ever residing permanently in London. As the eldest son of an important judge and politician but a minor East Lothian landowner, it appears that Fletcher always saw his future as a laird in East Lothian rather than as a politician in London. This was in contrast to the third duke of Argyll’s own son, English born and of bastard birth, son of the duke’s housekeeper Ann Williams. He was made an officer in the Guards on reaching adulthood, and inherited both ‘the Library’ and the duke’s country estate at Whitton near Hounslow (now subsumed into what has become the airport at Heathrow).viii ‘William Williams’ had accompanied his father on visits to Scotland in the 1750s as the duke inspected the gothic castle he was constructing on his ancestral estate in Argyll with the profits of his politics, changed his name to Campbell after his father’s death, and never went to Scotland again.ix London and England, indeed, although British (a term Fletcher never employed in his correspondence) remained foreign, and ‘John Bull’ was viewed at a distance. When a bill to allow the Court of Session to regulate lawyers’ fees was discussed in the House of Commons in 1748, Fletcher wrote that the Scottish M.P.s Charles Hope and Andrew Mitchell, despite being consulted previously, spoke against the bill in the house ‘and threw out so many Firebrands, about the Emoluments those writers receivd, and its being forsted into this Bill, in somuch that John Bull, who cannot endure the very name of an attorney, also took fire, and the Clause was blown up’.x When the issue of financial compensation for the abolition of heritable jurisdictions was discussed, ‘Mr Viner said it was extremely hard that England should pay so much for Scottish Feathers, and that this was a memorable Instance of English generosity & Scotch Modesty’.xi During the peace negotiations with France in 1748, when Fletcher reported that Lord Cathcart and the earl of Sussex were to stand as hostages in France for safe conduct of negotiators, Fletcher noted that ‘John Bull does not relish this sort of treating’.xii In 1752 during the debates on the bill to annex forfeited Jacobite estates to government ownership, Fletcher reported that in the House of Lords

3 the Duke of Bedford opposed it very warmly 1mo That it was impossible to cary it into execution: 2do That if it could be executed, great danger might arise, as it would aggrandize the power of the neighbouring great Lords, who would probably be the Commissioners. That no Lowlander could be expected to be a Commissioner … 3tio That this was laying an unjust aid an unnecessary expence upon the Publick, wch was to be paid only by England as the Scotch had paid no Coach Tax for the year 1751.xiii

One can see in this the origins of the suggestion that Lord Milton acquire a coach in London in 1752(see below). The bill passed, Bedford being answered by Lord Chancellor Hardwicke as well as by the duke of Argyll and Marquess of Tweeddale. Both Argyll and Tweeddale clearly, however, were held responsible by influential opinion in London for allowing the 1745 rebellion its initial success, despite, or perhaps because of, the political rivalry between the two men. When the duke of Argyll became involved in raising Highland regiments for the British army after war broke out again with France in 1756, Fletcher permitted a note of triumph to enter his report to his father that ‘the extraordinary success wt which the two Highland Corps [Montgomery’s and Fraser’s regiments] has been Recruited, gives great satisfaction to all Concerned, Some of the John Bulls cannot believe that such a Body of men could be raisd in so short a space’.xiv In 1762, during an attempt by Scottish M.P.s to obtain an act allowing a militia to be raised in Scotland in accordance with similar legislation for England and Wales, Fletcher wrote that ‘as for Scotland, if it was not the point of Honour, perhaps that Country would be happier without it – Tis amazing yt Jo: Bull who complains of its heavy weight, does not lay some of it upon Sister Peg, a motion wch would come properly from him, if he knew the present state of the country, but the arming of the Highlands seems still to frighten him.’xv In this letter Fletcher refers to the language of the pamphlet The History of the Proceedings in the Case of Margaret, commonly called Peg, only lawful sister to John Bull, Esq (1761), written in imitation of John Arbuthnot’s History of John Bull (1712), which was the most successful of the promilitia pamphlets published at the time, denouncing Scottish subservience to ‘the People Above’.xvi However, there was also the issue of English liberty and the lack of it in Scotland that did not cast the latter in a favourable light. Heavy-handed recruiting methods were criticised in Fletcher’s correspondence with his father. When a suspected poacher was killed resisting impressment near Tranent in 1757 Fletcher

4 wrote to his father that ‘I am afraid the Constable and his Party cannot easily be justified: when they found the door locked, they had no right to demand admittance, or to endeavour to break into the House. Such an attack would kindle a great flame in this part of the Country’.xvii Some years later, when the Lord Justice Clerk dismissed an attack by English officers on a toll keeper outside as ‘a drunken Squabble’, Fletcher, who underlined the phrase in his letter to Milton, wrote that the duke of Argyll did ‘not much approve of this sort of softness’, in an affair in which the Englishmen had referred to the toll keeper as a ‘Scotch rebel bouger’, the appelation recorded in the records of the Scottish Court of Justiciary when the case was brought to trial.xviii In 1756, at the beginning of the war, Fletcher mentioned that accounts from Edinburgh suggested that ‘the late Riot there seems intirely to be owing to Capt Fegusons unwarrantable Roughness and indiscretion’.xix He added in a later letter that ‘I find 5 [cipher for Lord Justice Clerk Tinwald] is much difficulted how to treat the Complaint made against Capt Ferguson &c for the Illegal manner in which he impressed men at Perth. Such an Insult upon Liberty would not be suffered in this part of the United Kingdoms. 291 [cipher for the Duke of Argyll] has writ to 5 [Lord Justice Clerk] about this very serious Affair’.xx He returned to the subject in his next letter: ‘291 [duke of Argyll] is concernd for the behaviour of 5 [Lord Justice Clerk] and 42 [cipher for the Court of Session] in the late affair of PERTH [in cipher]. Why there should be such a want of spirit and resolution to punish so notorious a violation of Libertys I cannot imagine, ….’xxi The issue that Fletcher felt would prevent unsuitable behaviour by the military was the extension of the English militia system to Scotland. In 1756 he had written to his father that ‘What you mentiond about 76 [cipher for Hanoverians] is extremely just, whereas we have had the fatal experience of 77 [cipher for Hessians] and 133 [cipher for Dutch], Militice et domi, and I fancy they are not better, yn when you remember them’xxii This was an issue that introduced a degree of tension between Fletcher and his father on the one hand, and the Duke of Argyll on the other. Argyll, aged 75 when the English Militia Act was passed in 1757, intended originally to use legislation passed by the old Scots Parliament and ‘all the Acts since 1716 relating to Highlands (most of ym drawn wt that view by His Grace[Argyll]’ that contained ‘powers vested in the Lieutenants’ about the Militia or fencible men’, which had been used in 1715 and 1746.xxiii Matters in Scotland, however, reached the point that Lord

5 Milton felt that he should become involved in public meetings in Edinburgh intended to put pressure on the government to extend the English militia laws to Scotland.xxiv ‘The language held about 3 [cipher for Lord Milton] is, that He is not materially concerned about the success of this, &c but as the Voice of the Country called for a Militia, he thought it prudent & advisable to send up some plan that was tolerably well digested for their Consideration’.xxv Yet in Scotland those who favoured a new bill compared Milton favourably to his uncle, the Fletcher of Saltoun, whose example had been cited in the pamphlet literature relating to the issue.xxvi Fletcher became part of the committee of Scottish M.P.s set up to introduce a Scottish militia bill in the House of Commons ‘as the Committee [in Scotland] recommended, and I dare say every thing will be done to promote and forward a Scheme, which is so much for the welfare and Honour of that part of the United Kingdom’.xxvii Indeed Lord Milton had chosen his son as one of the six Scottish M.P.s who were to act for the militia committee in Scotland. A week later Fletcher wrote acknowledging a direct communication from the committee in Scotland: ‘I beg leave to acknowledge the Honour which the Committee has conferrd upon me on this occasion, and to assure them of my hearty Concurrence and earnest endeavours to promote such a Constitutional measure, which is so much for the Honour and Welfare of that part of the United Kingdom’.xxviii Two days later Fletcher wrote to his father that there is to be a meeting of 172 [cipher for Scotland] MEMBERS [in cipher] about the Militia, at present no great opposition is apprehended, unless about the Militia to be established in the Highlands, which may be easily got over, as that part of the Country is intirely altered within these few years. In short the whole turns upon this, if the Militia is found useful in England, why should not the same salutary measure be extended to Scotland.xxix When Scots M.P.s met, Fletcher reported that it was agreed that ‘we ought to follow’ the English Act ‘as near as possible’ and that

The provision to be made for the Families of those called out and in actual service, will be considered in another meeting, as present tis a heavy load on the Counties in England, and it were to be wishd that some expedient could be found out to lessen that Expense, either by giving the Parish an option to send out such men, as will not bring a Charge upon them &c but upon all Events, it cannot be so expensive to us, as in this part of the Country, where the Labourers wages are so high.xxx

6 When Sir Gilbert Elliot introduced the bill in the House of Commons, Fletcher reported that Alderman Baker, Lord Midleton and Sir William Williams spoke against the principle of any Militia,xxxi and that Lord Egmont thought a Militia might revive the martial spirit which the legislation passed by Parliament after the last Jacobite rising had been suppressed. Fletcher’s summary of the arguments of those supporting the bill, including Englishmen such as Charles and George Townshend and George Grenville, was

That Scotland had not been properly defended, as only a few Regular Troops could be spared for that service – hence a large extent of Coast was open to Insult and depredation - …. That in such distressful Circumstances the Country had unanimously applied to Parlt. For a Militia to defend themselves &c which to be refused in ipso limine, was a sort of treatment that tended to disgust and exasperate a brave and loyall people – That it was odious to draw a line of defence, and proscribed a part of that Country, which was really drawing Articles of Separation between the two United Kingdoms. That Jacobitism was worn out, and that Those suspected Clans had in this war performed signal Services for this country, …. xxxii

Unfortunately the zeal of Andrew Fletcher and Gilbert Elliot was insufficient to prevent the bill being rejected at its Second Reading on 15 April 1760, when the Lord Advocate for Scotland, Robert Dundas of Arniston, declared his opposition (and thereby ensured his appointment as Lord President of the Court of Session in Scotland later that year). English Whig opponents emphasised that the economic cost of introducing a militia would undo the economic and social progress that had been made in the fifteen years since the Jacobite rebellion and raised the spectre of the militia contributing to a revival of Jacobite sympathies in Scotland by appealing to the militaristic values of the past.

II London clearly impressed Fletcher when he first encountered the metropolis as a resident in 1747. Initially he took a room on Argyle Street near the duke’s townhouse, and later he had his own room in the duke’s household.xxxiii He reported on his first experience of being an M.P. at the Cockpit, hearing ministers inform government supporters of their policies, but was moved to make more of an observation on the Lévées he attended: ‘most people are taken up in running about to the different Lévées, this is an odd kind of Life, but there is a time for every thing’.xxxiv He dined with the third duke of Argyll at the seat of the duchess of the

7 second duke of Argyll at Sudbrook, where Argyll’s sister-in-law (the second duke was his elder brother) ‘inquird very kindly after your Lop’ and it was reported that ‘we walkd from that [Sudbrook] to Twicknam ferry, and the Duke was so kind as to shew me Ham Gardens’ at Ham House, where the second and third dukes of Argyll grew up after 1689.xxxv Very soon in his correspondence with his father, however, Fletcher dwelt less on London and more on his family’s house at Saltoun (always spelled Salton in his letters) outside the village of Pencaitland in East Lothian, or the duke of Argyll’s work on Inveraray Castle, so that landscape and place in his correspondence is almost exclusively Scottish.xxxvi Thus for Fletcher London was the place from which he wrote about his family’s property in Scotland, or his patron Argyll’s property there. In this he reflected the distant yet possessive perspective on Scottish property developed by the second and third dukes of Argyll during the eighteenth century, but whereas they viewed their London property as personal and left it to members of their immediate family after their deaths, Fletcher was to anticipate the attitude of these men’s grandnephew Henry, duke of Buccleuch, who after Eton and the Grand Tour took up his principal residence on his estates in Scotland rather than become the statesman and politician moulded in his uncle’s image that his stepfather, the Englishman Charles Townshend M.P., had aspired to on his behalf.xxxvii Yet the third duke of Argyll embarked on a fantastic project at Inveraray after inheriting his elder brother’s title, creating a modern Gothic castle in the middle of the west Highlands. Although the pilgrimage to Scotland he staged annually from 1743 as third duke might seem just that from a modern perspective, it should be remembered that at its centre was the ambition of altering the rural landscape that had come into his possession in Scotland, just as he had attempted to transform rural landscape at the small estates he had acquired as a younger man at the Whim in near Leadburn and at Whitton in Middlesex in England. He also kept his London ways and his London table while at Inveraray. When Alexander Carlyle was at the duke’s house there in 1758 (with the castle still incomplete), he noted that Argyll played ‘two rubbers at sixpenny whist, as he did in London’ after he took his evening tea (he also drank two bottles of claret).xxxviii Yet Argyll died in London and in many ways died a Londoner in his townhouse, although he was buried in the family plot at Roseneath in Argyllxxxix

8 Argyll’s nephew the third Earl of Bute had as a young man had his portrait painted in full highland dress,xl but after his years at Court and in London politics ended in retirement he went to his English estate at Luton Hoo in Bedfordshire, and later added Christchurch in Hampshire opposite the Isle of Wight.xli When in 1781 James Boswell recorded speaking with Bute about Bute’s son’s identification with the Bute estate, the earl regretted that his grandson had never seen Bute and probably never would. ‘Pray my Lord,’ Boswell recorded himself as saying, ‘give me leave to ask, when was your Lordship last there?’ When Bute admitted that it had been over thirty years since he left his house at Mountstuart on Bute, Boswell claimed to have replied ‘Allow us to lament. Though the Stuart of Bute is very well as we see him in South Audley Street’ [in London].xlii Fletcher consistently evokes this perspective in his correspondence, writing from London in great detail about property and place in Scotland and through that constructing a shared connection with his father. On 14 January 1752 Fletcher wrote to his father regarding boxes of ‘Kitchen Garden seeds for Roseneath and Inveraray’ as well as a box of seeds for himself, destined for Saltoun, ‘I have got a Bushel of tolerable good acorns from a Friend.’xliii The next month Fletcher wrote at length about his plans for Saltoun. Was he influenced by being part of Argyll’s grandiose project at Inveraray? He certainly wanted change at Saltoun, writing to his father in favour of a ‘new Road through Archy Smiths Farm which is a most necessary work, as it will be useful to the Country, and convenient to your Lo[rdshi]p’. Yet utility would be complemented by more aesthetic concerns: ‘Part of the old Road as you formerly observed will afford a piece of good ground and well sheltered for Planting some of our most tender Plants which will form a Beautiful screen round these fields’.xliv Referring to the seeds he sent the previous month, Fletcher hoped ‘that James Gray, wt the Reinforcement wch I put under his command, have made some progress in levelling and reducing into some tolerable shape that rough piece of the garden which will the better enable His Grace to determine how to lay out that piece of ground.’ Evidently Argyll was advising the Fletchers on their plans for Saltoun. Nor was he alone, as the Earl of Home’s gift of oak seedlings from The Hirsel (see below) was discussed in terms of providing the potential to alter the landscape of the estate. Fletcher wrote on 7 April 1752 that he was glad ‘that so many of the oaks are come from the Hirsel, and that your Lp[rdshi]p has ordered the neighbouring seedling

9 Firs to be planted in the base places of the muir; This is an excellent expedient and I make no doubt but they will thrive better being moved with the Clod, than if they had been brought from a nursery garden.’xlv At the beginning of 1753 Fletcher wrote at length about the ‘new garden wall’ at Saltoun, conveying the weighty deliberations both of the third duke of Argyll and his nephew the Earl of Bute. Rather than considering whether they dared to eat a peach, they considered how far apart to plant pear trees. ‘Lord Bute who is very knowing, thinks that 30ft is enough for Pears, and that between ym you should Plant Peaches ….’ On the other hand, wrote Fletcher, ‘Mr Gordon who is a Great Gardner and Nursaryman is of opinion that Pears ought to be 36ft distant one from another …. Thus your Lop has the opinions of the most learned and experienced gardners: However I should be glad to have a draught of the wall shewing the order and distance in which you design to plant ….’xlvi The detail with which Fletcher wrote about Saltoun from London exceeded the reports of the political transactions in which he was enmeshed, with the exception of the militia issue discussed above, the one issue which appears to have engaged Fletcher in his political career. For example, early in 1753 he wrote that:

Your Lop does extremely well to plant the Pears in Baskets, by which means, they may be safely moved: Pray what do you intend to do with the upper part of the old road between the Hedges, running towards the great springs. Though it will be hard to trench, yet I am afraid, nothing will thrive there without trenching: As the ground rises towards the spring, a screen of wood there would warm the field, and shelter it from the S.west woods. If it is trenched, it will certainly sprie up a vast quantity of stones for the Highways.xlvii

In this example, a note of utility implies that the aesthetics of changing the rural landscape were justified in terms of an improvement that was practical as well as beautiful. Two months later Fletcher wrote again with instructions for James Gray: ‘as you Lop will now be often at Salton youll please look to the remainder of the high ground between the Hedges which is not trenched, if you reinforce the three men which I have kept this winter under James Gray, it will be a Job for ym, indeed I believe trenching will be the only method to sweeten and prepare that piece of Ground for Trees.’xlviii During the summer Fletcher again discussed ‘the brae on Maigry side’ at Saltoun, adding that ‘I long to be at the Highways but we must continue to make

10 the Blans [Blance] and Samuelston People [from these villages] work, for they were very backward to come out last year, notwithstanding of their being often summoned’.xlix This is a rare example of people on the Fletcher estate entering the text of the Fletcher correspondence, as opposed to frequent discussion of its physical environment. Improvement was not so much about agricultural productivity as about the aesthetic desirability of creating a landscape which minimised the physical evidence of the existence of a human population there. A few years later the young James Boswell behaved similarly. As early as 1763, while in London on the run from his legal studies at Edinburgh, the factor at Auchinleck wrote to him that ‘it might be of use at Spare hours you’d purchase Some plans of Noblemens Seats’ as ‘Something must be done in finishing about the New House’ (Auchinleck was completed in 1762). ‘Likewise a few different kinds of seeds either of Trees or flowers, you might please Send to Edinr. As directed for My Lord [Auchinleck], which would be no small comfort to him, as you know his taste, that way.’l In 1766 the factor reported that ‘since you left this we have been employed in Planting trees in Several places viz. In Broomholm, among the Avenus and by the Court in front etc. The Ditchers is going on with Ditching on South side of Barony etc.’li Boswell’s letters to his father’s factor were returned to him when he became laird so that he could destroy what he viewed as their injudicious content, so those published represent only a remnant of the correspondence. Unlike Fletcher in later life, Boswell would find that after inheriting his estate ‘London inexorably drew him in’, claiming that it was cheaper to live in London than at Auchinleck. In London it was not necessary ‘to provide the laird’s hospitality and entertain visitors’, although the suspicion remains that Boswell’s attraction to London was more complex than this suggests.lii We know very little about non-elite Scots in London during the eighteenth century. There is no chapter on Scots, for example, in Peter Linebaugh’s The London Hanged (1993), which contains a chapter entitled, ‘If you Plead for your Life, Plead in Irish’. Yet after the Jacobite rebellion of 1745-46 there were certainly Scots amongst the ‘London hanged’. Linebaugh identified the Irish as a distinctive immigrant group in the metropolis, implying that somehow the Scots and Welsh were assumed to occupy a different status there.liii They were ‘British’, and by being so, it

11 has been assumed that they shared something with London in a way that the Irish did not. While famous Jacobites such as Lord Lovat were executed in London with much publicity after the last Jacobite rebellion, there are some references in Andrew Fletcher’s correspondence to others less well known, suggesting that returning to Linebaugh’s sources with more awareness of the Scots as a social group with a separate identity would identify others, and no one can doubt that between 1747 and 1765, the years in which Andrew Fletcher spent most of the year in London, that Scots had a distinctive identity there. Fletcher wrote to his father in December 1747 that ‘there is a great mortality amongst the old Generals, yesterday Serjeant Smith was hanged in Hyde Park, he died very hard, and regreted his not being allowed to have a plaid waistcoat.’liv It is difficult to know how to interpret that cryptic observation. The sentence immediately preceding it in the letter cited reads: ‘I have the pleasure to acquaint you that the duke’s throat is a good deal better tho’ his hoarseness still continues’, so Serjeant Smith did not receive a lengthy obituary, nor is there any explanation as to why he should be described as one of ‘the old Generals’. Five years later, writing to his father in Scotland in 1752, Fletcher followed a paragraph expressing his joy that oak seedlings from the Earl of Home’s seat at The Hirsel near Coldstream had arrived at his family’s estate in East Lothian (discussed above) with another report on an execution in London; that of Mary Blandy, who although English, poisoned her father in the hope that she would be able to marry the younger son of a Scottish nobleman, William Henry Cranstoun.lv Fletcher’s report was that ‘yesterday morning Miss Blandy was executed, tis said that she behaved wt great Composure, and Resolution and that she declared herself innocent of any intention to poison her Father.’lvi This was followed by the observation that ‘for these two days past the weather has been warm, and kindly for plants’. The next year Fletcher wrote of the last execution in London of a Scottish Jacobite: ‘On Thursday last Dr Cameron was brought to the Court of Kings Bench. He confessed that he was the person attainted, and behaved with great Composure, both before and after sentence was passed. He desired a week longer that he might have time to see His wife /coming from France/ and give orders about his seven Children. He is to be executed on Thursday fortnight.’.lvii In a later letter Fletcher noted briefly that ‘Dr Archibald Cameron was executed this day at Tyburn. Tis said that he behaved wt great Decency and Resolution.’lviii Of course, the

12 execution of Cameron involved more than his becoming one of ‘the London Hanged’, as a traitor’s death in Old England was more gruesome than a hanging.lix A better example of the gap in our knowledge of the Scots in London during this period between elite groups such as Members of Parliament and the unchronicled Scots who came in substantial numbers to join the population of the city can be identified from recent research by John Black on illegitimate births in central London during the eighteenth century, which identified Sir James Carnegie, M.P. as the father of a child recorded in the St-Mary’s-le-Strand Bastardry Examination Book for 1752. Sir James Carnegie sat for a Scottish constituency and was a relative of the Fletcher family. He had written to Fletcher’s father Lord Milton in 1742 that the ‘Broad Bottom’ opposition to Sir Robert Walpole at the end of his long ministry had proved ‘too narrow for Sir John Hind [Hynd] Cotton’s broad A--e’.lx Indeed Andrew Fletcher wrote to his father from London on 8 May 1752 that ‘I have desired Sir James Carnegie to send up the best Evidence he can get of Mr Thomsons being a reputed Whig’ to ensure that an appointment of a political ally to a post in Scotland was approved.lxi John Black records that a servant formerly employed by Sir James at his house in , Christian Berryhill (as her name is recorded in the St-Mary’s-le- Strand Bastardry Examination Books), took up a place as a servant to John Beuerman, a tailor living in Great Suffolk Street on 16 December 1751. Carnegie arrived to take up lodgings with Beuerman on 8 January 1752 and, according to the parish records ‘had carnal knowledge of the body of this Examint. [ie Christian Berrychill] and several times after in his said Lodgings between that time & the Middle of the next Month’, and that on 19 October 1752 Berrychill gave birth to an illegitimate son baptised by the name of James Carnegie.lxii There are some references in Fletcher’s correspondence to people from Scotland drawn to London to work for the Scottish community there. In 1752 he wrote to his father, after discussing work at Salton, that

‘as for Robt Yuil, as far as [I] can remember, he told me, that he proposed to go to London for his improvement and begd me to get him leave to work at Whitton [Argyll’s house in Middlesex]I told him that ye garden was then fully mann’d as I had lately recommended two Scotch gardeners to work there for some time, and therefore advised him to stay in Scotland, until one of these gardeners went away of which I should acquaint him As Robt seemd to apply himself only to gardening I don’t

13 wonder that he desired to come here where he may receive great Improvement as well as encouragement.’lxiii

In 1753 he reported on 18 January that ‘Yesterday the Three Highland Boys arrived [presumably from Argyll], all well and in good condition. The Boy designd for Lady Betty Mackenzie [niece of the duke of Argyll] is lodged at Hew Browns house as my Mother desired.’lxiv Yet while Fletcher discussed bringing gardeners and servants to London in his correspondence he also often discussed sending goods back to Scotland from what he perceived as an superior source of supply. As part of the rearrangement of legal and revenue civil offices in Scotland carried out in 1748 Fletcher’s father Lord Milton resigned as head of the Scottish criminal Court of Justiciary (although remaining an ordinary member) to allow a colleague promotion, and was compensated with office as Keeper of the Signet seal in Scotland, an office formerly associated with that of Secretary of State for Scotland. After the Marquess of Tweeddale had resigned as secretary of state in 1746, Argyll had written to Milton that ‘the Scheme is to sink again the office as formerly, but to give the Signet to some Scotchman, this I insisted on.’lxv So to an extent the appointment was recognition of Milton’s indispensable role in the government of Scotland after 1745. There was also some ceremonial role as well, for Milton’s son wrote to him on 14 April 1748 that ‘Genl Campbell [the future fourth duke of Argyll] is of opinion that you had better by new Cloathes for your Trumpets, and says if you incline he will chuse the Lace and Cloath from his own Cloathier, who will sell it 30pr Cent Cheaper yn at Edinburgh….’lxvi In 1752 Fletcher wrote to his father ‘that as you want a new Coach, you should give orders to have one made here’ [London].lxvii Fletcher’s suggestion related to family plans to travel to London to be presented at Court in the summer of 1752. This had to be cancelled due to claims by members of the Whig opposition in London that Milton and Argyll were protecting known Jacobites in Scotland (see the discussion of the Duke of Bedford’s aspersions regarding Scotland quoted above), but by the end of the following year Fletcher could report that the new family coach was under construction: ‘Your Coach and four wheeld Chaise are upon the stocks’.lxviii The implication was that London- built was more economical, but there was no assertion of superior craftsmanship. Later Fletcher wrote that he would send wallpaper from London for redecoration at

14 Saltoun House,lxix again implying economy: ‘The great Advantage of fitting ym [rooms at Saltoun] up in this cheap manner is, that you have the immediate use of them without any great expence, while at the same time this does not hinder you to finish them in a higher taste, when you think proper.’ He also noted the cheapness of lead from England, presumably in relation to sourcing it for work at Inveraray: ‘Lord Marchmont employs --- Scot [sic, ie a man named Scott], and gets his lead from Newcastle and says it comes cheaper than from the Duke of Queensberry or Lord Hopetoun.’lxx London was also a source of seed for planting in Scotland. Fletcher wrote to his father at the end of December 1752 that ‘there is no Beech mast [seeds] this year But there are some Acorns and plenty of silver and spruce fur seed - The grass seeds are at present very good and tolerably Cheap, the best white Clover being only sixpence pr pound.’lxxi In January 1753 Fletcher wrote that ‘If Quaker Miller has a good assortment [of seeds] youll get them easier and safer from him. If not, youll please acquaint me, and Ill send you the best sorts, which I incline to thinks is the best way, as we cannot much depend upon the nursery men about Edinburgh.’lxxii William Miller (1684-1757) had succeeded his father as a nurseryman with a garden near Holyrood Palace, and like his father was identified with the small Edinburgh meeting of the Society of Friends.lxxiii At other times more domestic commodities are mentioned in the Fletcher correspondence. Sometimes they were Scottish manufactures that were to be utilised in London households to promote the linen trade in particular. On 12 January 1749 Fletcher wrote his father that ‘Mr Mackenzie desird me to put your Lop in mind of the Table Cloth that was to be sent and would be glad to know the prices of the Linen already sent, as also to know the Prices of Coarse Linnen for Servants sheeting and other common uses.’lxxiv On the other hand, as mentioned above, luxuries could be sourced in London for dispatch to Scotland. In June 1753 Fletcher reported that ‘Lady Betty Mackenzie told me that you wanted some Glasses for the Dining room at Salton. I should be glad to receive your Lops orders about them.’lxxv Later he wrote that he had ordered ‘four pds of the best Green Tea for her Lap [his mother Lady Milton] which I fancy will be enough as no quantity was mentiond’.lxxvi Another commodity sent from London were ‘grubs’, pamphlets and broadsheets relating to the Scots (particularly during this period) or to more general

15 political issues. Fletcher did not elaborate but twice mentions enclosing them with his letter, just as he commented on an article in the Scottish press he had obviously read in a copy sent to London: ‘the extraordinary paper in the Caledonian Mercury Decr 4th against the continuation of the Bounty on taking off the drawback [on linen cloth and yarn] occasions great speculation here’.lxxvii On 12 January 1748 Fletcher wrote ‘Inclosed is a Grubstreet on Geo: Drummond’ , and on 31 March 1753 he wrote that ‘The enclosed Grub was occasioned by a late memorable transaction’. lxxviii On another occasion he enclosed a published sermon at the request of the Duke of Argyll: ‘P.S. the Duke desir’d me to send you the Inclosed as a Copy of the Righteousness of His Ministers at Inveraray’.lxxix As its patron, Argyll had made Inveraray a collegiate parish (supporting more than one minister) in 1744, but was not a particular admirer of most ministers in the Church of Scotland at that time.lxxx

So Andrew Fletcher the third evoked the spirit of his famous grandfather during his participation in the campaign to establish a Scottish militia. The first Andrew Fletcher was another Scot who spent much of his life in London and drew inspiration, or a cautionary example, from what he saw there. The difference was that the eldest Andrew Fletcher also travelled extensively on the continent. During the 1690s Fletcher had spent most winters in London, where he met John Locke and helped Locke find a tutor for William Molyneux’s son, but in his absence he maintained a correspondence with his brother Henry regarding tenancies of farms, planting of trees and enclosure of fields that were not dissimilar (although better expressed) than his grand nephew’s correspondence with his nephew Lord Milton in the 1750s. Indeed, even when a member of the Scots Parliament, Fletcher would visit London regularly, and in later life he visited when not travelling on the continent, attending, for example, the trial of Henry Sacherverall in 1710. He died there in 1716 at lodgings in Charles Street, with his nephew and namesake in attendance, recording the ‘patriot’s’ last words as ‘Lord have mercy upon my poor countrey that is so barbarously oppressed’.lxxxi In naming his own son Andrew, the future Lord Milton drew upon his uncle’s legacy, and there are echoes of it in his son’s correspondence with him in the 1750’s. After the third duke of Argyll died, there was a period in which Andrew Fletcher M.P. and his father the Keeper of the Signet continued their involvement in the government of Scotland by serving Argyll’s nephews the Earl of

16 Bute and Bute’s brother James Stewart Mackenzie along with the new fourth duke of Argyll (cousin of the two previous dukes) and his sons ‘Jack’ (who from 1761 became known as Lord Lorne) and Lord Frederick Campbell. With his father’s decline, the last Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun lost interest in London. The final letter preserved in Fletcher’s correspondence with his father is a draft by Milton urging his son to attend Parliament in 1765 to defend the King’s prerogative.lxxxii Having obtained a lucrative sinecure office worth £1200 per annum as Auditor General of the Exchequer in Scotland through the influence of his father and the duke of Argyll in 1751, the third Andrew Fletcher spent his remaining years improving Saltoun.lxxxiii Fletcher married into another Lothian gentry family in 1764 at the age of forty-two, taking as his spouse Jeanie, daughter of Sir Robert Myreton, second Baronet of Gogar near Edinburgh. They had no children. After Fletcher’s death in 1779 the estate passed to one of his younger brothers, a General in the British army whose military career had been advanced by his father’s service to the Argyll and Bute political dynasties.

i John Robertson, ‘Fletcher, Andrew, of Saltoun’, Oxford DNB. ii Michael Fry, ‘Fletcher, Andrew, Lord Milton’, Oxford DNB. iii Namier and Brooke, eds., History of Parliament: The House of Commons 1754- 1790 iv ‘Come and compleat the union, and teach us to talk and act like Freemen and Britons’, quoted in Richard Sher, Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment (1985), p. 223, quoting Carlyle’s letter to Charles Townshend, M.P., 1 November 1759. v This is summarised clearly in M.S. Bricke, ‘The Pelhams vs. Argyll: A Struggle for Mastery of Scotland’, 1747-1748’, Scottish Historical Review, Vol. LXI (1982), pp. 157-165. vi NLS MS 16615 f81, Argyll to Milton, 18 Jan 1746. vii See Roger Emerson, ‘Catalogus Librorum A.C.D.A., or, The Library of Archibald Campbell, Third duke of Argyll (1682-1761’ in Paul Wood, ed., The Culture of the Book in the Scottish Enlightenment (2000). Emerson points out that the formal name for Argyll’s residence was ‘Argyll House’. viii John Stuart Shaw, The Management of Scottish Society (1983) pp.98-99, and Emerson, Ibid, p.8. ix NLS MS 16524 f19, 10 Feb 1763. Campbell receives acknowledgement for granting William Coxe access to his father’s papers in the preface to Memoirs of the Life and Administration of Sir Robert Walpole, Earl of Orford, 3 vols. (1789). x NLS MS 16514 f194, 5 April 1748. xi Ibid., f202 recto and verso, 22 April 1748. xii Ibid., f249, 8 Nov. 1748. xiii NLS MS 16516 f135, 21 March 1752. xiv NLS MS 16519, f71, 12 March 1757. xv NLS MS 16523 f83, 2 Jan 1762.

17 xvi A modern edition appeared in 1982 with the claim that the pamphlet was written by David Hume, but both John Robertson , Scottish Enlightenment, pp. 113-4 and Richard Sher, Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment (1985), pp. 230-2, refute this and establish Adam Ferguson as the author. xvii NLS MS 16519 ff88-89, 12 April 1757. See Alexander Murdoch, ‘The Killing of George Wood at Tranent, 3 April 1757’, Transactions of the East Lothian Antiquarian and Field Naturalists’ Society, Vol. XX (1988), pp. 21-32. xviii NLS MS 16523 f27, 26 Feb 1761. See Alexander Murdoch, ‘”Beating the Lieges”: The Military Riot at Ravenshaugh Toll on 5 October 1760’, Transactions of the East Lothian Antiquarian and Field Naturalists’ Society, Vol. XVII (1982), pp. 39-47. xix NLS MS 16518 f61, 6 April 1756. xx Ibid., f105, 15 July 1756. xxi Ibid., f108, 20 July 1756. xxii Ibid., f32, 24 Feb 1756. This could be a reference to the use of Dutch and German troops in Scotland at the end of the 1715 Jacobite rebellion, who were the majority of the ‘British’ army that forced the Jacobites to disperse early in 1716. See Bruce Lenman, The Jacobite Risings in Britain 1689-1746 (1980, reissued 1995), p. 153. xxiii NLS MS 16521 f112, 14 July 1759. xxiv John Robertson, The Scottish Enlightenment and the Militia Issue (1985), p. 106. xxv NLS MS 16522 f30, 17 Jan. 1760. xxvi Robertson, Scottish Enlightenment, pp. 99, 108. xxvii NLS MS 16522, f53, 28 Feb 1760. xxviii Ibid., f56, 4 March 1760. xxix Ibid., f60, 6 March 1760. xxx Ibid., f62, 11 March 1760. Robertson, Scottish Enlightenment, pp. 110-111. xxxi All were supporters of the Duke of Newcastle. William Baker was a London Alderman who was M.P. for Plympton Erle 1747-1768, George Broderick Viscount Midleton (in the peerage of Ireland) was M.P. fopr Ashburton 1754-1761 and New Shoreham 1761-1765, and Sir William Williams was M.P. for New Shoreham 1758- 1761 see the relevant entries in Namier and Brooke, eds, History of Parliament… 1754-1790 (1964), three volumes. xxxii NLS MS 16522, ff64-65, 13 March 1760. xxxiii NLS MS 16514., f75, 26 Oct 1747. xxxiv Ibid., f79v, 12 Nov. 1747. xxxv Ibid., f214v, 10 July 1748. xxxvi For Inveraray see Ian G. Lindsay and Mary Cosh, Inveraray and the Dukes of Argyll (1973). xxxvii Brian D. Bonnyman, ‘Agricultural Improvement in the Scottish Enlightenment: the third Duke of Buccleuch, William Keir and the Buccleuch Estates, 1751-1812’ (University of Edinburgh Ph.D., 2004). xxxviii Lindsay and Cosh, Inveraray, pp. 100. xxxix Ibid, pp. 177-8. xl James Holloway, Patrons and Painters: Art in Scotland 1650-1750 (1989), p. 59, figure 42. The portrait is by William Aikman (1682-1731). Bute was born in 1713 and was educated at Eton and Utrecht. xli Peter D. Brown, ‘Bute in Retirement’ in KarlW. Schweizer, ed., Lord Bute: Essays in Re-interpretation (1988).

18 xlii J. Reed and F Pottle, eds., Boswell: Laird of Auchinleck, 1778-1782 (1977, reissued 1993), p. 344. The spelling of Bute’s surname was not consistent in the eighteenth century. For example, his brother’s monument to his brother James Stewart Mackenzie in Westminster Abbey uses that spelling. See below regarding Boswell’s feelings for his family’s estate. xliii NLS MS 16516 f112, 14 Jan 1752. xliv NLS MS 16516 f123, 20 Feb 1752. xlv Ibid., f141. xlvi Ibid., f192, 11 Jan 1753. xlvii Ibid., 292, 3 Feb. 1753. xlviii Ibid., f218, 31 March 1753. xlix Ibid., f252, 14 July 1753. l Nellie Pottle Hankins and John Strawhorn, eds., The Correspondence of James Boswell with James Bruce and Andrew Gibb, Overseers of the Auchinleck Estate (1998), p.1 li Ibid, p11, Bruce to Boswell, 22 Nov. 1766. lii John Strawhorn, ‘Introduction’ in Ibid, p.xli. liii Emyrs Jones, ‘The Age of Societies’ in Emrys Jones, ed., The Welsh in London 1500-2000 (2001). Linda Colley included consideration of the Welsh and Scots in her study of the creation of British patriotism, but not the Irish. See Britons:Forging the Nation 1707-1837 (1992), especially Chapter 3, ‘Peripheries’. liv NLS MS 16514 f93, Andrew Fletcher, M.P. to Andrew Fletcher, Lord Milton, 12 Dec. 1747. My efforts to identify ‘Serjeant Smith’ have been unsuccessful. lv See Oxford DNB. lvi NLS MS 16516 f141, 7 April 1752. lvii Ibid., f239, 19 May 1753. lviii Ibid., f245, 7 June 1753. lix Roger Turner, ‘Cameron, Archibald (1707-1753)’ in ODNB. lx NLS MS 16587, f187v, Sir James Carnegie to Lord Milton, 16 March 1742 lxi NLS MS 16516 f158 lxii John Black, ‘Illegitimacy, Sexual Relations, and Location in Metropolitan London, 1735-85’ in Tim Hitchcock and Heather Shore, eds., The Streets of London (2003), pp. 114-5. lxiii NLS MS 16516 f123, 20 Feb 1752. lxiv Ibid., f197. lxv NLS MS 16604 f174, Argyll to Milton, 14 Feb [docketed in a contemporary hand 14 Feb 1745, but from internal evidence 1746]. It has been placed with correspondence for 1745 in its current folder and box. lxvi NLS MS 16514 f198 lxvii NLS MS 16516 f123, 20 Feb 1752. lxviii Ibid., f271v, 13 Dec 1753. lxix NLS MS 16516 f143v, 9 April 1752. lxx Ibid., f199, 27 Jan 1753. Both Queensberry and Hopetoun had leadworks on their estates near Wanlockhead. See T.C. Smout, ‘Lead-mining in Scotland, 1650-1850’ in P.L. Payne, ed., Studies in Scottish Business History (1967), pp. 104, 110, 113-15, 118-19, 124. lxxi NLS MS 16516 f179, 30 Dec 1752. lxxii Ibid., f192, 11 Jan 1753.

19 lxxiii Forbes W. Robertson, Early Scottish Gardeners and their plants 1650-1750 (2000), p.196. Figure 99 on p.192 shows the ‘Quaker’s Garden’ on the south side of the palace by ‘the road from the King’s Park’. lxxiv NLS MS 16515 f23. ‘Mr Mackenzie was James Stewart Mackenzie, brother of the Earl of Bute. lxxv Ibid., f243, 5 June 1753. lxxvi Ibid., f254, 16 July 1753. lxxvii Ibid., f271v, 13 Dec. 1753. lxxviii NLS MS 16514 f155 and MS 16516 f218v. lxxix NLS MS 16514 f159v, 26 Jan 1748. lxxx H. Scott, Fasti Ecclesiae Scoticanae, New Edition, Vol. IV (1923), pp. 11-12. lxxxi John Robertson, ‘Fletcher, Andrew, of Saltoun (1653?-1716) in ODNB. lxxxii NLS MS 16524 f193, Milton to Fletcher, begins ‘Dear Son’ and docketed ‘Scrol to Mr Fletcher 18 Janry 1765’. lxxxiii Edith Haden-Guest, ‘Fletcher, Andrew (1722-79) in Namier & Brooke, eds, History of Parliament. The date of 1799 given for his death in the ODNB entry for his father is an error and is due for correction in the online edition in January 2007.

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